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," she told the two deputies, "they shall be banished out of Scotland, albeit they preached as truly as ever did St. Paul." When they reminded her of her previous promises, she replied in words that were never forgotten, and which her grandson, James VI, recalled and laid to heart in his own dealings with his subjects. "It became not subjects," she said, "to burden their princes further than it pleaseth them to keep the same." For a time, however, she consented to stay further action against the preachers. But, if she were to carry out the task she had undertaken, she must sooner or later make trial of her strength against what had now become actual rebellion. In Perth, Dundee, and Montrose the Protestant preachers, with the approval and countenance of the constituted authorities, openly proceeded with their work of spreading their new opinions. At length the Regent took the step which was to be the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church in Scotland. She summoned the preachers to appear before her at Stirling on May 10th, and on this occasion it was recognized by both parties that the moment for decisive action had come. To be ready for all contingencies, a numerous body of Protestant gentlemen from Angus and the Mearns, all, it is specially noted, "without armor," took up their quarters at Perth, where they were immediately joined by another contingent from Dundee. With this last body came John Knox, who on May 20th had finally returned to his native country.

All through their contest with the Regent, the Protestant leaders took up the position that they were acting in strict accordance with the law of the land. With the formidable following now at their back, they might have marched on Stirling and gained a temporary advantage by their show of strength. What they actually did was to send Erskine of Dun to the Regent to lay their demands once more before her. As she was not yet in a position to enforce her will, she again agreed to postpone action against the preachers. It was the misfortune of her position from the beginning of the struggle that Mary of Lorraine was driven to subterfuges which made impossible any permanent understanding with her discontented subjects; and it was of evil omen for the success of her policy that she now allowed herself to commit a serious breach of faith. In the teeth of her promise to Erskine, she proclaimed the preachers as outlaws when they failed to appear at Stirling on the day appointed for their trial. The news of the Regent's breach of faith was the immediate occasion of the first stroke in the Scottish Reformation. The day after the outlawry John Knox preached a sermon in the parish church of Perth, his theme being the idolatries of Rome, and the duty of Christian men to put an end to them. At the close of the sermon, when the majority of the audience had left the church, a priest proceeded to celebrate mass. A forward boy made a protesting remark; the priest struck him; the boy retaliated by throwing a stone which broke an image, and immediately the church was in an uproar. In a few moments not "a monument of idolatry" was left in the building. The news of these doings spread through the town, and the "rascal multitude" took up the work. There had been old quarrels between the town and the religious orders; and so early as 1543 a violent assault had been made on the Blackfriars' monastery. But on the present occasion the work done was at once more extensive and more thorough. The main onslaught was directed toward the monasteries of the Dominicans and the Franciscans and the Charterhouse Abbey; and within two days, says Knox, "the walls only did remain of these great edifications."

But the time demanded deeds more than words. With a force of about eight thousand French and Scots, D'Oysel, the Regent's chief adviser, advanced to Auchterarder, some twelve miles from Perth. With this formidable force behind her, the Regent naturally expected that her rebellious subjects would be disposed to abate their demands. To learn what terms they would now be willing to accept, she sent to Perth the lord James Stewart, Lord Sempill, and the Earl of Argyle. They were told that the town would be surrendered if assurance were given of freedom of worship and security to the worshippers. As a reply to these demands, the Regent despatched the lyon king-of-arms to make proclamation that all should "avoid the toune under pane of treasone." At this moment, however, the Earl of Glencairn, at the head of a body of two thousand five hundred Ayrshire Protestants, made his way to within six miles of Perth. Thus checkmated, the Regent was again driven to a compromise; and on the conditions that she should quarter no French troops in the town, and grant perfect freedom of worship, the gates were at length thrown open to her. Thus closed the first act of the drama of the Scottish Reformation.

This good understanding was of short duration. Again the action of the Regent gave rise to an accusation of broken pledges. She kept to the letter of the late compact, but she evaded its spirit. She did not quarter French troops in the town, but she occupied it with Scottish soldiers in French pay, and, in further disregard of her pledges, treated the Protestants with a harshness which gave rise to bitter complaint on the part of their leaders. Argyle and the lord James, the two most prominent of these leaders, had accompanied her into Perth , but, indignant at these proceedings, they secretly quitted the town and at once took action to make good their protests. Summoning the Protestant gentlemen of Angus and the Mearns to meet them in St. Andrew's on June 3d, they proceeded to that town, as the best centre of action after Perth. In St. Andrew's as in Perth it is John Knox who is again the outstanding figure. Here his preaching was attended by the same notable results. The monasteries of the Dominicans and the Franciscans were practically demolished by the mob, and with the approval of the magistrates every church in the town was stripped of its ornaments. Meanwhile the Regent had not been idle, and was now at Falkland with a force led by D'Oysel and Ch?telherault. Confident in their strength, those two leaders marched toward Cupar, with the intention of dealing with St. Andrew's. But again they discovered that they had miscalculated the resources of the insurgents. Issuing from St. Andrew's, with little over a hundred horse, Argyle and the lord James were speedily re?nforced by contingents from Lothian and Fife, which raised their numbers to above three thousand men. Thus strengthened, they took up their position on Cupar Muir, and awaited the approach of the Regent's forces. But in number these forces were now inferior to those of the enemy; and, as many of the French soldiers were Huguenots and secretly sympathized with their fellow-believers, the issue of the battle could not but be doubtful. Again, therefore, there was no alternative for the Regent but to temporize. It was agreed that there should be a truce of eight days, that the Regent's forces now in Fife should be removed from that county, and that, during the armistice, an attempt should be made to effect some permanent understanding.

What the Guises meant speedily became apparent. About the middle of August a thousand French soldiers landed at Leith; and, as they were accompanied by their wives and children, the object of their coming could not be misunderstood. If the leaders of the Congregation, therefore, were not to lose all the ground they had lately gained, a time for vigorous action had again come. As had been previously concerted, they met at Stirling on September 10th and took counsel as to their further action. Here they were joined by an ally who, by his rank and his claims, was of the first importance to their cause. This was the Earl of Arran, the eldest son of the Duke of Ch?telherault, who, a few months previously, had been forced to flee from France by reason of his Protestant sympathies. The value of the new confederate was soon realized. Passing to Hamilton palace, the insurgent leaders there met the Duke himself, to whom they held out such alluring prospects that he openly identified himself with their cause. During these transactions at Hamilton, alarming news came of the doings of the Regent. It was reported that she was busily engaged in fortifying Leith--a proceeding, the Congregation maintained, in direct violation of the late treaty. Disregarding their protest, she steadily proceeded with the work; and, as she was strengthened by a new contingent of eight hundred French men-at-arms, her position by the middle of autumn was such as to excite alarm alike in Scotland and England. Again there was no arbitrament but by the sword.

On October 16th the insurgent leaders entered Edinburgh with the intention of laying siege to Leith, where the Regent had taken refuge as the safest place in the kingdom. One of their earliest steps was the most audacious they had yet taken. They formally deposed Mary of Lorraine from the regency, on the ground that she had ruled as a tyrant and was betraying the country to a foreign enemy. But they soon found that they had taken a task beyond their strength. Their force amounted to but eight thousand men, most of whom were "cuntrie fellows" with no experience in war, and whose service could not extend beyond a few weeks. To this undisciplined host was opposed a garrison of three thousand trained soldiers, with the command of the sea and intrenched in a town fortified after the best military art of the time. Fortune, moreover, was against the Congregation from the first. A new instalment of one thousand pounds, secretly sent by Elizabeth, was cleverly seized by James, Earl of Bothwell, afterward the notorious helpmate of Mary Stuart. Their arms, also, met with no success. While a detachment of their troops was in pursuit of Bothwell, the enemy found their opportunity and made their way even into the streets of Edinburgh; and on November 25th the reformers sustained so severe a reverse that the capital was no longer a safe place for them. They had no money to pay the few mercenaries whom they had hired; the town was tired of them; and the earl Marischal, who had charge of the castle, held resolutely aloof.

As at the close of their previous rising, the leaders held a council at Stirling to determine their future policy; before they entered on their deliberations, Knox was called upon to preach a sermon--Knox, of whom it was said that he "put more life" into those who heard him "than five hundred trumpets continually blustering" in their ears. The deliberations that succeeded took a sufficiently practical shape. Young Maitland of Lethington, who had lately deserted the Regent for the Congregation, was despatched to England with offers that might induce Elizabeth to give direct support to the cause of Protestantism in Scotland. As to their own future action, the lords made the following arrangement: Ch?telherault, Argyle, Glencairn, and the lords Boyd and Ochiltry were to make their head-quarters in Glasgow; while Arran, the lord James, the lords Rothes and Ruthven, and John Knox were to act from St. Andrew's as their centre. Their counsels at an end, they separated with the intention of reassembling at Stirling on December 16th. They had thus tried two falls with the Regent, and in both they had been worsted: the third trial of strength was to have a different ending.

The Regent was not slow to follow up her advantage. She took possession of the capital two days after the Congregation had quitted it, and she tried hard, but in vain, to persuade the earl Marischal to surrender the castle. The arrival of fresh re?nforcements from France at the beginning of December enabled her to abandon her defensive policy and to take decisive measures for the suppression of revolt. On Christmas Day, while the Protestant lords were in council at Stirling, two detachments of her troops, commanded by D'Oysel, drove them precipitately from the town. Pursuing his advantage, D'Oysel despatched his troops across Stirling bridge into Fife, and he himself with another detachment crossed from Leith, apparently with the object of gaining possession of St. Andrew's. The task proved a hard one. At every step he was beset by the Scots under Argyle and the lord James. "The said Earl and Lord James," says Knox, "for twenty-one days they lay in their clothes; their boots never came off; they had skirmishing almost every day; yea, some days, from morn to even." Yet, in the teeth of all obstacles, D'Oysel steadily forced his way to within six miles of St. Andrew's, where Knox and his friends had all but abandoned hope. But unexpected deliverance was at hand. On January 23, 1560, a fleet of strange vessels appeared at the mouth of the Frith of Forth. As a French fleet had been expected for some weeks, D'Oysel concluded that his armament had come at last. He was soon undeceived. Under his eyes the strangers seized two ships bearing provisions from Leith to his own camp. The strange vessels were an advanced squadron of a fleet sent by Elizabeth to block the Frith of Forth against further succors from France. It was now D'Oysel who was in extremities; and before he found himself safe in Linlithgow he had vivid experience at once of the rigors of a Scotch winter and of the savage hate which his countrymen had come to inspire in the nation which for three centuries had called them friends and allies.

Meanwhile, the mission of Maitland to the English court was about to lead to one of the most notable compacts in the national history. At Berwick-on-Tweed, the lord James Stewart, Lord Ruthven, and three other Scottish commissioners met the Duke of Norfolk and concluded a treaty which was to insure the eventual triumph of the Congregation, to make Scotland a Protestant country, and at a later day a constituent part of a Greater Britain. The treaty was in effect a bond of mutual defence against France--Elizabeth having reluctantly consented that an English army should at once enter Scotland and assist the Congregation in driving the French soldiery out of the country. While her revolted subjects were thus making strong their hands against her, fortune was otherwise deserting the cause of the Regent. A great French armament, which was to have brought over a force sufficient to crush all opposition, had been driven back by a succession of storms; and she herself was already stricken with the disease which was soon to carry her off. In these circumstances there was but one course open to her--to fall back on the policy of self-defence and patient waiting on events. After one somewhat wanton expedition against Glasgow and the Hamiltons, her troops finally retired within the fortifications of Leith, and she herself at her special request was received into the castle of Edinburgh.

On April 4th the English and Scottish hosts joined forces at Prestonpans, and on the 6th they sat down before Leith. The spectacle was one suggestive of many reflections; English and Scots, immemorial foes, were fighting side by side against the ancient friend of the one, the ancient enemy of the other. There could not be a more memorable illustration of the saying that "events sometimes mount the saddle and ride men." Even with their united strength the allies had a formidable task before them. At the outset of the siege the English amounted to about nine thousand men, the Scots to ten thousand; but before many weeks had gone, these numbers had dwindled to a half. With this force the English commander, Lord Gray, had to besiege a town defended by four thousand trained soldiers and fortified by the most skilful engineers of the time. Two severe reverses sustained by the allies prove that in discipline and skill they were no match for the enemy. On April 14th the French sallied from the town, and, breaking through the English trenches, slew two hundred men. A combined assault on the town was brilliantly repulsed--the English and Scots leaving eight hundred dead and wounded in the trenches. It was not long before all three parties were sick of the contest. The Guises had their hands full at home and needed every soldier they had; Elizabeth heartily disliked the task of assisting rebel subjects and grudged every penny that was spent in it; and the Congregation had never been in a position to support a protracted war.

The death of the Regent on June 10th must have quickened the desire of the Guises for peace; for where she had failed to effect their purposes no one else was likely to succeed. Alike by her own character and gifts and by the momentous policy of which she was the agent, Mary of Lorraine is one of the remarkable figures in Scottish history. It was her misfortune--a misfortune due to her birth and connections--that she found herself from the first in direct antagonism to the natural development of the country of her adoption, and that the circumstances in which she ruled were such as to bring into prominence the least worthy traits of the proud race from which she sprang. Yet in personal appearance, as in courage and magnificence, she was the true sister of Henry of Guise and the Cardinal of Lorraine, "the Pope and King of France." Construed to a larger and more charitable sense than that in which they were written, the words of Knox fitly enough sum up her career. She was "unhappy--to Scotland--from the first day she entered into it unto the day she finished her unhappy life."

On June 16th commissioners arrived from England and France with powers to effect an arrangement between the contending parties. From England came Cecil and Dr. Wotton, Dean of Canterbury and York; and from France, Monluc, Bishop of Valence, and Charles de Rochefoucauld, Sieur de Randan. From the beginning, the French representatives gave it to be understood that any treaty that might be made was exclusively between England and France; the Congregation were rebel subjects with whom their prince could in no wise treat. After many difficulties that more than once threatened to put an end to further negotiations, a settlement was at length reached . The final arrangement signally proved how hopeless the Guises were of their immediate prospects in Scotland. Mary and Francis were to desist from using the arms of England; no Frenchman was henceforth to hold any important office in Scotland; the fortifications of Leith were to be demolished; and the French soldiers, with the exception of one hundred twenty, were at once to be sent home in their own country. Till the return of Mary the government was to be intrusted to twelve persons, of whom she was to appoint seven and the estates five. In the treaty no arrangement was made regarding religion; but, with the powers now placed at their disposal, there could be little doubt how the Protestant leaders would interpret the omission. Thus had Elizabeth and the Congregation gained every point for which they had striven; and their victory may be said to have determined the future, not only of Britain, but of Protestantism. So far as Scotland is concerned, the treaty of Edinburgh marks the central point of her history.

The way being thus cleared, the next step was the logical conclusion of all the past action of the Protestant leaders. In three successive acts, all passed in one day, it was decreed that the national Church should cease to exist. The first act abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope; the second condemned all practices and doctrines contrary to the new creed; and the third forbade the celebration of mass within the bounds of Scotland. The penalties attached to the breach of these enactments were those approved and sanctioned by the example of every country in Christendom. Confiscation for the first offence, exile for the second, and death for the third--such were to be the successive punishments for the saying or hearing of mass.

What is thrust upon us by the narrative of events in Scotland is the singular moderation alike of the representatives of the old and the new religion. Heretics had been burned indeed, but the number was inconsiderable compared with that of similar victims in other countries; and, even in the day of their triumph, the Scottish Protestants, in spite of the stern threat of their legislation, were guiltless of a single execution on the ground of religion. What is still more striking is, that difference of faith begot no fanatical hate among the mass of the people. In France and Spain men forgot the ties of blood and country in the blind fury of religious zeal, but in Scotland we do not find town arrayed against town and neighbor denouncing neighbor on the ground of a different faith. That this tolerance was not due to indifference the religious history of Scotland abundantly proves. It was in the convulsions attending the change of the national faith that the Scottish nation first attained to a consciousness of itself, and the characteristics it then displayed have remained its distinctive characteristics ever since. It is precisely the combination of a fervid temper with logical thinking and temperate action that have distinguished the Scottish people in all the great crises of their history.

It soon appeared that the Protestant triumph was not so complete as it might have seemed. Those who saw furthest--and none was more keenly alive to the fact than Knox--were well aware that many a battle must yet be fought before the new temple they had built should stand secure against the assault of open enemies and equivocal friends. The inherent difficulties of the situation became speedily manifest. Mary and Francis refused to ratify the late measures--a fact, says Knox, "we little regarded or do regard." What he did regard, however, was the continued alliance and support of England; and he was now to learn that, having attained her own objects, Elizabeth was not disposed to be specially cordial in her future relations to the Protestants in Scotland. It had been for some time in the minds of the Protestant leaders that a marriage between Elizabeth and the Earl of Arran would be an excellent arrangement for both countries; and in October a commission was actually sent to make the proposal. The reply of Elizabeth was that "presently she was not disposed to marry." An important event made this rebuff additionally unwelcome: on December 5th, Francis II, the husband of Mary Stuart, unexpectedly died. Had her husband lived, Mary might have continued to live in France, which had been so long her home, and Scotland might have been left in large degree to settle its own affairs. Now the probability was that Mary would return to her own country, and with all the authority and prestige of a legitimate sovereign renew the battle that had been lost by her mother. It was, therefore, with gloomy forebodings that all sincere well-wishers to the Reformed Church in Scotland saw the close of this year of their apparent triumph.

Even before her return Mary had clearly indicated the policy she intended to follow. In February she had sent deputies to the estates to urge the renewal of the ancient league with France--a step which, at their meeting in May, the estates decisively refused to take, as being the virtual abandonment of their cause. In view of her imminent return, Mary's supporters began to bestir themselves in a fashion that boded ill for the future peace of the country. At Stirling the bishops met in council to consider their best policy; and we have it from one of their own number that they were acting in concert with the earls Huntly, Athol, Crawford, Marischal, Sutherland, Caithness, and Bothwell. As the result of their counsels, a proposal was sent to Mary which she had the prudence to reject in her own interest as well as in the interest of her kingdom. The proposal was that she should land at some point on the northern coast where the earls would be ready to support her with twenty thousand men. As a safer course for the immediate future, Mary chose the advice proffered to her by the party for the present in the ascendant. Through the lord James Stewart as their deputy, the Protestant leaders urged upon her the necessity of leaving religion as she would find it, and of adopting as her advisers the persons now at the head of affairs. When at length, on August 19, 1561, Mary landed at Leith, it appeared that at least for the time she was content to take things as she found them. That she would accept them as definitive, no one, and least of all John Knox, could so far delude himself as to believe.

THOMAS CARLYLE

It seems to me hard measure that this Scottish man, now after three hundred years, should have to plead like a culprit before the world; intrinsically for having been, in such a way as it was then possible to be, the bravest of all Scotchmen! Had he been a poor Half-and-half, he could have crouched into the corner, like so many others; Scotland had not been delivered; and Knox had been without blame. He is the one Scotchman to whom, of all others, his country and the world owe a debt. He has to plead that Scotland would forgive him for having been worth to it any million "unblamable" Scotchmen that need no forgiveness! He bared his breast to the battle; had to row in French galleys, wander forlorn in exile, in clouds and storms; was censured, shot at through his windows; had a right sore fighting life: if this world were his place of recompense, he had made but a bad venture of it. I cannot apologize for Knox. To him it is very indifferent, these two hundred and fifty years or more, what men say of him. But we, having got above all those details of his battle, and living now in clearness on the fruits of his victory, we, for our own sake, ought to look through the rumors and controversies enveloping the man, into the man himself.

This Prophet of the Scotch is to me no hateful man! He had a sore fight of an existence; wrestling with Popes and Principalities; in defeat, contention, life-long struggle; rowing as a galley-slave, wandering as an exile. A sore fight: but he won it. "Have you hope?" they asked him in his last moment, when he could no longer speak. He lifted his finger, "pointed upward with his finger," and so died. Honor to him! His works have not died. The letter of his work dies, as of all men's; but the spirit of it never.

MARY STUART: HER REIGN AND EXECUTION

A.D. 1561-1587

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

Apart from the peculiar interest of her own life and reign, Mary Stuart is an important personage as having been the mother of the first sovereign of the Stuart line in England .

Historical critics take widely differing views of the conduct and character of the Queen of Scots, both in her individual life and her relation to public affairs. In the complications then involving the political and religious organizations of Europe, the play and counter-play of motives are difficult to follow, and just discrimination becomes at times almost impossible.

In like manner, the troublous times in which Mary Stuart was called to act her part rendered her own way intricate and uncertain. A devotee of the Catholic faith, she was placed upon the throne of Scotland at the very hour when that country, under the powerful leadership of John Knox, was fast becoming Protestant. This state of affairs made her task as ruler in her own realm sufficiently trying. But her difficulties were increased by the inevitable antagonisms with her great Protestant rival, Elizabeth of England, and through the involved relations of Great Britain with Spain and Catholic Europe generally. These historical puzzles seem always to call for fresh explanation. No less perplexing are the circumstances into which this Queen was drawn by her marital relations and other personal entanglements.

Upon all these matters Swinburne sheds light through the medium of a sound critical judgment, in a style no less conspicuous for its fascination than by reason of its illuminative power.

Mary , Queen of Scots, daughter of King James V and his wife Mary of Lorraine, was born in December, 1542, a few days before the death of her father, heart-broken by the disgrace of his arms at Solway Moss, where the disaffected nobles had declined to encounter an enemy of inferior force in the cause of a king whose systematic policy had been directed against the privileges of their order, and whose representative on the occasion was an unpopular favorite appointed general in defiance of their ill-will. On the 9th of September following, the ceremony of coronation was duly performed on the infant. A scheme for her betrothal to Edward, Prince of Wales, was defeated by the grasping greed of his father, whose obvious ambition to annex the crown of Scotland at once to that of England aroused instantly the general suspicion and indignation of Scottish patriotism. In 1548 the Queen of six years old was betrothed to the dauphin Francis, and set sail for France, where she arrived August 15th.

Debauchery of all kinds, murder in all forms, were the daily matter of excitement or of jest to the brilliant circle which revolved around Queen Catherine de' Medici. After ten years' training under the tutelage of the woman whose main instrument of policy was the corruption of her own children, the Queen of Scots, aged fifteen years and five months, was married to the eldest and feeblest of the brood on April 24, 1558. On November 17th, Elizabeth became Queen of England, and the princes of Lorraine--Francis the great Duke of Guise, and his brother the Cardinal--induced their niece and her husband to assume, in addition to the arms of France and Scotland, the arms of a country over which they asserted the right of Mary Stuart to reign as legitimate heiress of Mary Tudor. Civil strife broke out in Scotland between John Knox and the Queen Dowager--between the self-styled "Congregation of the Lord" and the adherents of the Regent, whose French troops repelled the combined forces of the Scotch and their English allies from the beleaguered walls of Leith, little more than a month before the death of their mistress in the castle of Edinburgh, on June 10, 1560.

On August 25th Protestantism was proclaimed and Catholicism suppressed in Scotland by a convention of states assembled without the assent of the absent Queen. On December 5th Francis II died; in August, 1561, his widow left France for Scotland, having been refused a safe-conduct by Elizabeth on the ground of her own previous refusal to ratify the treaty made with England by her commissioners in the same month of the preceding year. She arrived nevertheless in safety at Leith, escorted by three of her uncles of the house of Lorraine, and bringing in her train her future biographer, Brantome, and Chastelard, the first of all her voluntary victims. On August 21st she first met the only man able to withstand her; and their first passage of arms left, as he has recorded, upon the mind of John Knox, an ineffaceable impression of her "proud mind, crafty wit, and indurate heart against God and his truth."

Mary, who had already married her kinsman in secret at Stirling castle with Catholic rites celebrated in the apartment of David Rizzio, her secretary for correspondence with France, assured the English ambassador, in reply to the protest of his mistress, that the marriage would not take place for three months, when a dispensation from the Pope would allow the cousins to be publicly united without offence to the Church. On July 29, 1565, they were accordingly remarried at Holyrood. The hapless and worthless bridegroom had already incurred the hatred of two powerful enemies, the Earls of Morton and Glencairn; but the former of these took part with the Queen against the forces raised by Murray, Glencairn, and others, under the nominal leadership of Hamilton, Duke of Ch?telherault, on the double plea of danger to the new religion of the country, and of the illegal proceeding by which Darnley had been proclaimed king of Scots without the needful constitutional assent of the estates of the realm.

Murray was cited to attend to the "raid" or array levied by the King and Queen, and was duly denounced by public blast of trumpet for his non-appearance. He entered Edinburgh with his forces, but failed to hold the town against the guns of the castle, and fell back upon Dumfries before the advance of the royal army, which was now joined by James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, on his return from a three years' outlawed exile in France. He had been accused in 1562 of a plot to seize the Queen and put her into the keeping of Earl of Arran, whose pretensions to her hand ended only when his insanity could no longer be concealed. Another new adherent was the son of the late Earl of Huntly, to whom the forfeited honors of his house were restored a few months before the marriage of his sister to Bothwell. The Queen now appealed to France for aid; but Castelnau, the French ambassador, replied to her passionate pleading by sober and earnest advice to make peace with the malcontents. This counsel was rejected, and in October, 1565, the Queen marched an army of eighteen thousand men against them from Edinburgh; their forces dispersed in face of superior numbers, and Murray, on seeking shelter in England, was received with contumely by Elizabeth, whose half-hearted help had failed to support his enterprise, and whose intercession for his return found at first no favor with the Queen of Scots.

But the conduct of the besotted boy, on whom at their marriage she had bestowed the title of king, began at once to justify the enterprise and to play into the hands of all his enemies alike. His father set him on to demand the crown matrimonial, which would at least have assured him the rank and station of independent royalty for life. Rizzio, hitherto his friend and advocate, induced the Queen to reply by a reasonable refusal to this hazardous and audacious request. Darnley at once threw himself into the arms of the party opposed to the policy of the Queen and her secretary--a policy which at that moment was doubly and trebly calculated to exasperate the fears of the religious and the pride of the patriotic. Mary was invited if not induced by the King of Spain to join his league for the suppression of Protestantism; while the actual or prospective endowment of Rizzio with Morton's office of chancellor, and the projected attainder of Murray and his allies, combined to inflame at once the anger and the apprehension of the Protestant nobles.

According to one account, Darnley privately assured his uncle George Douglas of his wife's infidelity; he had himself, if he might be believed, discovered the secretary in the Queen's apartment at midnight, under circumstances yet more unequivocally compromising than those which had brought Chastelard to the scaffold. Another version of the pitiful history represents Douglas as infusing suspicion of Rizzio into the empty mind of his nephew, and thus winning his consent to a deed already designed by others.

A bond was drawn in which Darnley pledged himself to support the confederates who undertook to punish "certain privy persons" offensive to the state, "especially a stranger Italian called Davie"; another was subscribed by Darnley and the banished lords, then biding their time in Newcastle, which engaged him to procure their pardon and restoration, while pledging them to insure to him the enjoyment of the title he coveted, with the consequent security of an undisputed succession to the crown, despite the counter-claims of the house of Hamilton, in case his wife should die without issue--a result which, intentionally or not, he and his fellow-conspirators did all that brutality could have suggested to accelerate and secure.

On March 9th the palace of Holyrood was invested by a troop under the command of Morton, while Rizzio was dragged by force out of the Queen's presence and slain without trial in the heat of the moment. The parliament was discharged by proclamation issued in the name of Darnley as king; and in the evening of the next day the banished lords, whom it was to have condemned to outlawry, returned to Edinburgh. On the following day they were graciously received by the Queen, who undertook to sign a bond for their security, but delayed the subscription until the next morning under plea of sickness. During the night she escaped with Darnley, whom she had already seduced from the party of his accomplices, and arrived at Dunbar on the third morning after the slaughter of her favorite. From thence they returned to Edinburgh on March 28th, guarded by two thousand horsemen under the command of Bothwell, who had escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder, to raise a force on the Queen's behalf with his usual soldierly promptitude.

The slayers of Rizzio fled to England, and were outlawed; Darnley was permitted to protest his innocence and denounce his accomplices; after which he became the scorn of all parties alike, and few men dared or cared to be seen in his company. On June 19th a son was born to his wife, and in the face of his previous protestations he was induced to acknowledge himself the father. But, as Murray and his partisans returned to favor and influence no longer incompatible with that of Bothwell and Huntly, he grew desperate enough with terror to dream of escape to France. This design was at once frustrated by the Queen's resolution. She summoned him to declare his reasons for it in the presence of the French ambassador and an assembly of the nobles; she besought him for God's sake to speak out, and not spare her; and at last he left her presence with an avowal that he had nothing to allege.

The favor shown to Bothwell had not yet given occasion for scandal, though his character as an adventurous libertine was as notable as his reputation for military hardihood; but as the summer advanced, his insolence increased with his influence at court and the general aversion of his rivals. He was richly endowed by Mary from the greater and lesser spoils of the Church; and the three wardenships of the border, united for the first time in his person, gave the lord high admiral of Scotland a position of unequalled power. In the gallant discharge of its duties he was dangerously wounded by a leading outlaw, whom he slew in single combat; and while yet confined to Hermitage castle he received a visit of two hours from the Queen, who rode thither from Jedburgh and back through twenty miles of the wild borderland, where her person was in perpetual danger from the free-booters whom her father's policy had striven and had failed to extirpate.

On January 22, 1567, the Queen visited her husband, who was ill at Glasgow, and proposed to remove him to Craigmillar castle, where he would have the benefit of medicinal baths; but instead of this resort he was conveyed on the last day of the month to the lonely and squalid shelter of the residence which was soon to be made memorable by his murder. Between the ruins of two sacred buildings, with the town hall to the south and a suburban hamlet known to ill-fame as the Thieves' Row to the north of it, a lodging was prepared for the titular King of Scotland, and fitted up with tapestries taken from the Gordons after the battle of Corrichie. On the evening of Sunday, February 9th, Mary took her last leave of the miserable boy who had so often and so mortally outraged her as consort and as queen. That night the whole city was shaken out of sleep by an explosion of gunpowder which shattered to fragments the building in which he should have slept and perished; and next morning the bodies of Darnley and a page were found strangled in a garden adjoining it, whither they had apparently escaped over a wall, to be despatched by the hands of Bothwell's attendant confederates.

Upon the view which may be taken of Mary's conduct during the next three months depends the whole debatable question of her character. According to the professed champions of that character, this conduct was a tissue of such dastardly imbecility, such heartless irresolution, and such brainless inconsistency as forever to dispose of her time-honored claim to the credit of intelligence and courage. It is certain that just three months and six days after the murder of her husband she became the wife of her husband's murderer. On February 11th she wrote to the Bishop of Glasgow, her ambassador in France, a brief letter, of simple eloquence, announcing her providential escape from a design upon her own as well as her husband's life. A reward of two thousand pounds was offered by proclamation for discovery of the murderer. Bothwell and others, his satellites or the Queen's, were instantly placarded by name as the criminals. Voices were heard by night in the streets of Edinburgh calling down judgment on the assassins.

Four days after the discovery of the bodies, Darnley was buried in the chapel of Holyrood with secrecy as remarkable as the solemnity with which Rizzio had been interred there less than a year before. On the Sunday following, Mary left Edinburgh for Seton palace, twelve miles from the capital, where scandal asserted that she passed the time merrily in shooting-matches, with Bothwell for her partner, against Lords Seton and Huntly; other accounts represent Huntly and Bothwell as left at Holyrood in charge of the infant Prince. Gracefully and respectfully, with statesmanlike yet feminine dexterity, the demands of Darnley's father for justice on the murderers of his son were accepted and eluded by his daughter-in-law. Bothwell, with a troop of fifty men, rode through Edinburgh defiantly denouncing vengeance on his concealed accusers. As weeks elapsed without action on the part of the royal widow, while the cry of blood was up throughout the country, raising echoes from England and abroad, the murmur of accusation began to rise against her also. Murray, with his sister's ready permission, withdrew to France.

On April 21st Mary went to visit her child at Stirling, where his guardian, the Earl of Mar, refused to admit more than two women in her train. It was well known in Edinburgh that Bothwell had a body of men ready to intercept her on the way back, and carry her to Dunbar--not, as was naturally inferred, without good assurance of her consent. On April 24th, as she approached Edinburgh, Bothwell accordingly met her at the head of eight hundred spearmen, assured her--as she afterward averred--that she was in the utmost peril, and escorted her, together with Huntly, Lethington, and Melville, who were then in attendance, to Dunbar castle. On May 3d Lady Jane Gordon, who had become Countess of Bothwell on February 22d of the year preceding, obtained, on the ground of her husband's infidelities, a separation, which, however, would not under the old laws of Catholic Scotland have left him free to marry again.

On the day when the first or Protestant divorce was pronounced, Mary and Bothwell returned to Edinburgh with every prepared appearance of a peaceful triumph. Lest her captivity should have been held to invalidate the late legal proceedings in her name, proclamation was made of forgiveness accorded by the Queen to her captor in consideration of his past and future services, and her intention was announced to reward them by further promotion; and on the same day he was duly created duke of Orkney and Shetland. The Duke, as a conscientious Protestant, refused to marry his mistress according to the rites of her Church, and she, the chosen champion of its cause, agreed to be married to him, not merely by a Protestant, but by one who before his conversion had been a Catholic bishop, and therefore should have been more hateful and contemptible in her eyes than any ordinary heretic, had not religion as well as policy, faith as well as reason, been absorbed or superseded by some more mastering passion or emotion. This passion or emotion, according to those who deny her attachment to Bothwell, was simply terror--the blind and irrational prostration of an abject spirit before the cruel force of circumstances and the crafty wickedness of men. Hitherto, according to all evidence, she had shown herself on all occasions, as on all subsequent occasions she indisputably showed herself, the most fearless, the most keen-sighted, the most ready-witted, the most high-gifted and high-spirited of women; gallant and generous, skilful and practical, never to be cowed by fortune, never to be cajoled by craft; neither more unselfish in her ends nor more unscrupulous in her practice than might have been expected from her training and her creed.

But at the crowning moment of trial there are those who assert their belief that the woman who on her way to the field of Corrichie had uttered her wish to be a man, that she might know all the hardship and all the enjoyment of a soldier's life, riding forth "in jack and knapskull"--the woman who long afterward was to hold her own for two days together, without help of counsel, against all the array of English law and English statesmanship, armed with irrefragable evidence and supported by the resentment of a nation--showed herself devoid of moral and physical resolution; too senseless to realize the significance and too heartless to face the danger of a situation from which the simplest exercise of reason, principle, or courage must have rescued the most unsuspicious and inexperienced of honest women who was not helplessly deficient in self-reliance and self-respect.

The famous correspondence produced next year in evidence against her at the conference of York may have been, as her partisans affirm, so craftily garbled and falsified by interpolation, suppression, perversion, or absolute forgery as to be all but historically worthless. Its acceptance or its rejection does not in any degree whatever affect, for better or for worse, the rational estimate of her character. The problem presented by the simple existence of the facts just summed up remains in either case absolutely the same.

That the coarse and imperious nature of the hardy and able ruffian who had now become openly her master should no less openly have shown itself even in the first moments of their inauspicious union is what any bystander of common insight must inevitably have foreseen. Tears, dejection, and passionate expressions of a despair "wishing only for death," bore fitful and variable witness to her first sense of a heavier yoke than yet had galled her spirit and her pride. At other times her affectionate gayety would give evidence as trustworthy of a fearless and improvident satisfaction. They rode out in state together, and if he kept cap in hand as a subject she would snatch it from him and clap it on his head again; while in graver things she took all due or possible care to gratify his ambition by the insertion of a clause in their contract of marriage which made their joint signature necessary to all documents of state issued under the sign manual. She despatched to France a special envoy, the Bishop of Dunblane, with instructions setting forth at length the unparalleled and hitherto ill-requited services and merits of Bothwell, and the necessity of compliance at once with his passion and with the unanimous counsel of the nation--a people who would endure the rule of no foreign consort, and whom none of their own countrymen were so competent to control, alike by wisdom and by valor, as the incomparable subject of her choice.

But whatever cause she might have since marriage to complain of his rigorous custody and domineering brutality was insufficient to break the ties by which he held her. Alone, in the disguise of a page, she slipped out of the castle at midnight, and rode off to meet him at a tower two miles distant, whence they fled together to Dunbar. The confederate lords on entering Edinburgh were welcomed by the citizens, and after three hours' persuasion Lethington, who had now joined them, prevailed on the captain of the castle to deliver it also into their hands. Proclamations were issued in which the crime of Bothwell was denounced, and the disgrace of the country, the thraldom of the Queen, and the mortal peril of her infant son were set forth as reasons for summoning all the lieges of the chief cities of Scotland to rise in arms on three hours' notice and join the forces assembled against the one common enemy. News of his approach reached them on the night of June 14th, and they marched before dawn with twenty-two hundred men to meet him near Musselburgh. Mary meanwhile had passed from Dunbar to Haddington, and thence to Seton, where sixteen hundred men rallied to her side. On June 15th, one month from their marriage day, the Queen and Bothwell, at the head of a force of fairly equal numbers but visibly inferior discipline, met the army of the confederates at Carberry hill, some six miles from Edinburgh.

It was agreed that the Queen should yield herself prisoner, and Bothwell be allowed to retire in safety to Dunbar with the few followers who remained to him. Mary took leave of her first and last master with passionate anguish and many parting kisses; but in face of his enemies, and in hearing of the cries which burst from the ranks demanding her death by fire as a murderess and harlot, the whole heroic and passionate spirit of the woman represented by her admirers as a spiritless imbecile flamed out in responsive threats to have all the men hanged and crucified in whose power she now stood helpless and alone. She grasped the hand of Lord Lindsay as he rode beside her, and swore "by this hand" she would "have his head for this." In Edinburgh she was received by a yelling mob, which flaunted before her at each turn a banner representing the corpse of Darnley, with her child beside it, invoking on his knees the retribution of divine justice.

From the violence of a multitude, in which women of the worst class were more furious than the men, she was sheltered in the house of the provost, where she repeatedly showed herself at the window, appealing aloud with dishevelled hair and dress to the mercy which no man could look upon her and refuse. At nine in the evening she was removed to Holyrood, and thence to the port of Leith, where she embarked under guard, with her attendants, for the island castle of Lochleven. On the 20th a silver casket containing letters and French verses, miscalled sonnets, in the handwriting of the Queen, was taken from the person of a servant who had been sent by Bothwell to bring it from Edinburgh to Dunbar. Even in the existing versions of the letters, translated from the lost originals and retranslated from this translation of a text which was probably destroyed in 1603 by order of King James on his accession to the English throne--even in these possibly disfigured versions, the fiery pathos of passion, the fierce and piteous fluctuations of spirit between love and hate, hope and rage and jealousy, have an eloquence apparently beyond the imitation or invention of art.

Three days after this discovery Lord Lindsay, Lord Ruthven, and Sir Robert Melville were despatched to Lochleven, there to obtain the Queen's signature to an act of abdication in favor of her son, and another appointing Murray regent during his minority. She submitted, and a commission of regency was established till the return from France of Murray, who, on August 15th, arrived at Lochleven with Morton and Athol. According to his own account the expostulations as to her past conduct which preceded his admonitions for the future were received with tears, confessions, and attempts at extenuation or excuse; but when they parted next day on good terms, she had regained her usual spirits. Nor from that day forward had they reason to sink again, in spite of the close keeping in which she was held, with the daughters of the house for bedfellows. Their mother and the Regent's, her father's former mistress, was herself not impervious to her prisoner's lifelong power of seduction and subjugation. Her son George Douglas fell inevitably under the charm. A rumor transmitted to England went so far as to assert that she had proposed him to their common half-brother Murray as a fourth husband for herself; a later tradition represented her as the mother of a child by him. A third report, at least as improbable as either, asserted that a daughter of Mary and Bothwell, born about this time, lived to be a nun in France.

It is certain that the necessary removal of George Douglas from Lochleven enabled him to devise a method of escape for the prisoner on March 25, 1568, which was frustrated by detection of her white hands under the disguise of a laundress. But a younger member of the household, Willie Douglas, aged eighteen, whose devotion was afterward remembered and his safety cared for by Mary at a time of utmost risk and perplexity to herself, succeeded on May 2d in assisting her to escape by a postern gate to the lake-side, and thence in a boat to the mainland, where George Douglas, Lord Seton, and others were awaiting her. Thence they rode to Seton's castle of Niddry, and next day to Hamilton palace, round which an army of six thousand men was soon assembled, and whither the new French ambassador to Scotland hastened to pay his duty. The Queen's abdication was revoked, messengers were despatched to the English and French courts, and word was sent to Murray at Glasgow that he must resign the regency, and should be pardoned in common with all offenders against the Queen. But on the day when Mary arrived at Hamilton, Murray had summoned to Glasgow the feudatories of the crown, to take arms against the insurgent enemies of the infant King.

On the 13th of May the battle or skirmish of Langside determined the result of the campaign in three-quarters of an hour. Kirkaldy of Grange, who commanded the Regent's cavalry, seized and kept the place of vantage from the beginning, and at the first sign of wavering on the other side shattered at a single charge the forces of the Queen with a loss of one man to three hundred. Mary fled sixty miles from the field of her last battle before she halted at Sanquhar, and for three days of flight, according to her own account, had to sleep on the hard ground, live on oatmeal and sour milk, and fare at night like the owls, in hunger, cold, and fear.

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